Death After Death

Despite his protestations, his willpower was not as strong as he wanted to believe that night. The two prisoners she left behind didn’t last half an hour and the two that were brought after that were devoured even more quickly.

Simon might not have cared for it, but he had little choice in the matter. There was a starving animal inside of him, and though he could chain it down and away from the light when he was alone, as soon as something with a pulse was led into his cage, it broke its chains and ripped them to pieces.

The first two were the messiest, mostly because he had to fling himself from his coffin and crawl after them like some kind of zombie, with his legs flopping uselessly behind him. While he devoured the first, the second managed to wrestle one of the swords embedded in his coffin free and stab Simon, but he barely noticed as blood filled his mouth, and he felt another’s life flow through him.

No, not the sword, his mind whispered. Stake me!

He ripped the man with the weapon apart when he finally got past his guard, and when he was dead, too, Simon was covered in blood. That bothered him less than he thought it would, and when he stood once more, he had only a little regret about what he had done.

Executing prisoners was something he was normally comfortable with. He’d done it before. Draining his enemies with an empowered weapon to fuel his magic was something he’d made peace with, too. This was only a little worse than both of those things combined if he set aside the gore, yet to him, it felt a boundary he probably should never have crossed.

There’s nothing I can do about it now, though, he decided, even as he tried to figure out what damage all of this was doing to his freshly positive karma score as he waited impatiently for the guards to bring him fresh victims. He could walk a little now, so Ara’s plan was working.

Now, though, he was strong enough to kill himself, which left him with quite a dilemma. Should he? Simon looked to the shredded coffin. For a vampire, he was still weak and pathetic, but he was probably stronger than he’d been as a man. It would be the easiest thing in the world to rip that coffin apart and end his suffering.

You could start over back in the cabin, he told himself as he looked longingly at the wooden shards, but his self-pity abated as he realized that wouldn’t be true. Icefang had already told him as much; this awful world would keep on spinning when he pulled the rip cord, and in this case, with Freya, he was very directly responsible for this mess.

When I’ve saved this valley, I can die. He thought, resigned to his tragic fate. He’d already ruined this life, he might as well see it through. Then, I can repent for a life or two. Maybe I can become a monk or a vegetarian or something.

As awful as that would be, it wouldn’t be as bad as spending decades or centuries remembering that he could have helped people, but he’d chosen not to. For now, he would feast, and then he would fight, and hopefully, somewhere in there, he would die. Then, he would go back to the early levels and make sure Freya never became this creature, even if that cost him the chance to visit his son again.

His time with the dragon taught him one thing, Simon wouldn’t erase the boy as he thought he would have previously. He would just move to a different timeline where he’d never see the boy again. That was sad, but he could live with that separation a lot more than the idea that Freya would keep slaughtering innocents and causing depravities over and over again.

By the time the sun rose, Simon was curled up in his battered coffin and crusted in blood. He wasn’t in much worse shape than he’d been as an old man toward the end of his last life in Ionar, and he knew that with more death, he would only strengthen further. What he didn’t know was what other powers he might have at his disposal.

Vampires have weird magics all their own, he reminded himself just before his consciousness was extinguished by the weight of the sun rising slowly above him. It was something he would need to ask Ara about tomorrow.

At sunset, he arose, and then, when his door was unlocked, he staggered through the dungeon toward the keep where he found the vampiress. “See, I told you that you could walk with proper motivation,” she said with a cold smile. “Now let’s get you armed and—”

“Wait,” Simon interrupted, “Before I get a sword and whatever else, I want to know, how do you use the rest of your powers?”

“Rest of my powers?” she asked. “Like the mist and the gaze? You just sort of will it, and it happens. Those powers sort of… build over time. I didn’t have them at all for the first decade of being like this. I’m not sure how being in torpor so long will affect their development, either.”

That seemed a little oversimplified, but rather than tell her that, Simon tried to reach within himself while she continued to speak, and he found that there was definitely something there. With a little effort, he could even feel himself begin to dissipate, but he stopped almost immediately because it was unnerving. It reminded him of the feeling of slipping away to nothing when he’d been buried for so long.

“See, you’re getting it,” she nodded. “My men saw a few scouts on horseback come down from the pass earlier, but beyond that, nothing. They’re no doubt gauging the threat level. If they return to the rest of their army with good news, then that will be the beginning of the end.”

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Simon nodded. More than anything, he wanted a shower. He had no reflection to study, but from the way the few mortal men around him reacted, he looked every bit as hideous as he thought he might.

Normally, that would have bothered him, but right now, it was probably an advantage. Not only would it be easy enough to terrify his enemies. It made it easier to pretend that he was someone else. When he put on his proper, flabby flesh again, he’d be Simon, and he’d do the right things that Simon would do. For now, he could do whatever he wanted, and those deeds would belong to the monster that he was grateful he couldn’t see in the mirror.

Simon picked out a sword that would do, along with a buckler. In both choices, he favored weapons that were smaller than usual because he wanted to get within arm's reach rather quickly so he could use his fangs, and there was no point in denying it. In terms of armor, they had only poor choices. Nothing available was built for anyone as tall or slender as he currently was. He was still skin and bones, with only a few strands of lean muscle, so tonight, he would have to go without. Given how quickly he healed, he didn’t think that would be a problem.

When he left the castle walls, he felt like a beast as much as a man. He was far enough away from anywhere that he probably should have borrowed a horse, but he didn’t expect he’d need it for long.

He carried no pack or torch. He didn’t even have a bow because he didn’t trust his clawed fingers and shaky hands to use one correctly. He was just a scarred and withered abomination that refused to die, and as he strolled down into the valley, he took a long look around, then he sniffed at the wind, looking for anything that didn’t belong.

He’d been locked away from the world for decades, and inhaling now was almost too much, but he’d take that compared to the isolated hell he’d endured for so long. He smelled dozens of meals being cooked, along with hundreds of hearth fires. He smelled the scents of man and beast and, most of all, the damp smells of nature. He wasn’t interested in any of those, though, and sifted through them quickly, looking for something altogether more appetizing. He was looking for the scent of blood.

He found it in several places in the wide valley, which wasn’t surprising given how many animals would be slaughtered by these farmers every day. Every barnyard chopping block and village butcher was a distraction.

Each time he smelled manure or clean fresh meat hanging somewhere, he ignored it. Instead, he sought out the tang of oiled weapons and the smokey blaze of a campfire. After ten minutes of searching, he finally found a likely target at the far end of the valley, in the woods there, at the base of the mountain.

That was about the place he would have guessed that scouts would hide based on tactics alone. Still, he tried not to let those thoughts prejudice his decision. Not when he could let hunger guide him instead.

“You know, if you run, you might just make it before sunrise,” he said to himself in a growl that sounded almost human. Simon laughed at his own joke, at least until he settled into a coughing fit.

Once that was done, though, he focused. Simon had used many kinds of magic and gotten very good at impossible things. The idea of being a mist seemed a bit too disperse for him just now, but Vampires could turn into other things too, at least according to the dimly remembered movies. He didn’t like bats too much, though, so he decided to try ravens first.

It’s just like the saying, as the crow flies, he thought to himself wryly as he imagined himself as a murder of crows. That wasn’t so hard. He wasn’t really a person anymore. He was murder. Who was to say what shape that murder would take.

For a moment, he felt himself starting to burst apart at some unseen seams, and then, after only a little hesitation, he flew apart into pieces of darkness. One second, he had two eyes, four limbs, and, thanks to his mangled hands, seventeen digits. The next, he had eighteen eyes, just as many wings, and he was soaring in all different directions in a way that he found to be dizzying until the nine crows that made up who he was slowly reformed into a flock and began to soar over the valley.

He panicked in those first seconds and very nearly tried to pull himself back together into a man, but he resisted the urge. This is fine, he told himself. I can do this.

It was chaotic and frightening, but as they spread out throughout the sky and adopted some sort of pattern to their behavior, he found that seeing through more than a dozen pairs of eyes wasn’t nearly as insane as he would have thought it would be. His sense of smell had completely vanished in this form, but his compound vision was sharper than it had any right to be.

He could pick out dozens of tiny details from each farmstead and hamlet he passed over. How are vampires able to do this? He asked himself. Draining energy to fuel their hideous unlife curse, he got, at least, based on his current understanding of magic. Healing themselves quickly and preternatural strength even made sense, but the rest of it? He had no idea. He added it as one more question that he hoped to understand one day.

Tonight wasn’t about understanding, though. It was about sending a message, and after half an hour of flying across the valley, he sighted a small triangle of campfires in the woods, well off of the main road. While there were a few houses in the woods, too, the only tents he saw belonged to the men around those fires, and the bronze scale mail that they wore told him that they were here for a fight.

Simon landed in the trees around the camp, well out of the firelight, so as not to draw attention to himself. Then, instead of attacking immediately, he merely observed and listened.

Their armor and accents might be foreign, but other than that, the scene reminded him of any one of the bands of armed men he’d led in various wars and skirmishes over his many lives. These weren’t evil people. They were just people fighting for their cause. In their minds, they almost certainly saw themselves as liberators as much as conquerors. They would take this land, but they would do so for the good of the people who lived here already.

Simon heard strains of that in what the men said, between raunchy jokes and reminiscing about previous battles. It was clear that they’d decided that the dread vampiress, whom they referred to simply as the Widow, or alternately the Widowmaker, was no longer here and that their army could march on the valley with impunity.

Only their captain seemed unconvinced, and he rebuffed the words of the rest of his men with statements like, “We’ll give the place one more sweep tomorrow. Then, If there’s nothing to find, we’ll be back with the main body of the army before nightfall.”

“What’s the rush?” someone quipped. “This is the easiest duty I’ve had in weeks. I say we be extra thorough, just to make sure.”

Everyone laughed at that except for Simon. The captain’s caution was admirable, he decided, however, in this case, it was going to get everyone in his group killed.